Favorite Sons (12 page)

Kelso, standing in front of the courthouse in Steubenville, appeared on the screen, saying, “We have physical evidence linking Mr. Vukovich to the crime scene. He is currently being questioned by our detectives. As of yet, no charges have been filed. As soon as I'm able to release additional information, I will.”

“Have any idea when that will be?” the reporter asked.

“No, I don't.”

The reporter appeared back on the camera. “According to our sources, Vukovich grew up in Crystalton and has worked at the junior high there for at least the past five years. We'll continue to follow this story as it unfolds and update you at eleven. Reporting for Channel Nine news, I'm Don Redley.”

“Why's Uncle Jack on television?” Katie asked.

Deak ignored the question.

“I don't get it,” I whispered. “How can they charge him with the murder?”

“They haven't, yet. All they said is he's being held in connection with the death. They never said anything about charging him with the murder.”

“So, what's that mean?”

“Beats me. Lord in heaven, I hope my mother was busy with my grandfather and didn't see that.” No sooner were the words out of
his mouth than the telephone rang. All Deak said was, “Okay, okay, okay. I will. I will. I'll be fine. How's Grandpa? Okay. Love you, too. Bye.” He looked at me and said, “She saw it in the waiting room at the hospital. It's his heart. She said if they can get him stabilized they're going to transfer him to Allegheny Hospital in Pittsburgh. Girls, go upstairs and get your toothbrushes, pajamas, and some clean clothes for tomorrow. You're going to go down and spend the night at Aunt Sissy's.” The three girls cheered and tore up the steps on all fours. “I wish I was five and oblivious to all this; then I wouldn't have to put up with the humiliation.”

I called my mother, updated her on the situation, and told her that I would spend the night with Deak. Aunt Sissy, his father's sister, arrived from Martins Ferry forty-five minutes later and took the delighted girls for the night. Mom came up a few hours later to check on us and brought some ham sandwiches, chips, and RC Colas, although Deak said his stomach was too upset to eat.

A three-alarm fire had broken out in a restaurant in downtown Weirton, West Virginia, and Don Redley was reporting live from the scene for the eleven o'clock news. The story on Deak's Uncle Jack followed the fire, but it was simply a repackaged version of the early report and contained no additional information. Deak and I talked into the night, mostly asking each other the same question over and over: How could Jack Vukovich be linked to the murder? Despite the number of times we each asked the question, we had no logical answer. We fell asleep downstairs, Deak on the couch, me on the love seat, my legs draped over the end.

I awoke when the July 1 edition of the Wheeling
Intelligencer
bounced off the screen door. The banner headline across the top of the front page left nothing to the imagination.

Crystalton Man Charged with
Molesting Murdered Boy

Jack C. Vukovich, 35, a junior high school janitor with a history of sex-related crimes, has been charged with rape and gross sexual imposition in connection with the molestation of a mentally retarded
boy who was found dead of a head injury in a wooded area west of Crystalton last month.

Vukovich was arrested at Crystalton Junior High yesterday afternoon and is being held in the Jefferson County Jail pending arraignment tomorrow.

Jefferson County Sheriff Sky Kelso said Vukovich admitted to having sexual relations with Peter Eugene Sanchez, 17, of 117 River Street, Crystalton. However, Vukovich denied having any connection with Sanchez' death, Kelso said.

Kelso said detectives received a tip that Vukovich was in the area where Sanchez was killed on June 14, a day before the boy's body was discovered. The witness, who Kelso refused to identify, said Vukovich was spotted running out of an area known as Chestnut Ridge to his car, which was parked in Overlook Park on New Alexandria Pike just west of Crystalton. The park is about a quarter of a mile from where Sanchez' body was found.

A sheriff's department investigation revealed that Vukovich was convicted on a sodomy charge in Texas in 1961, and spent two years in a Texas penitentiary. In 1964, he was charged with the molestation of a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor in California. Those charges were dropped for unspecified reasons.

Kelso said an autopsy performed on Sanchez' body revealed that the boy had been molested and tests indicated that the assailant was someone with Vukovich's blood type. Kelso also said Vukovich's fingerprints were found on a ten-dollar bill that authorities recovered from Sanchez' pocket.

Presented with this evidence, Vukovich confessed to paying $10 to Sanchez, who has been described as having severe emotional and mental problems, in exchange for sexual relations. Kelso said Vukovich confessed to meeting Sanchez in the woods to have sexual contact “at least a half-dozen times” in the past.

“Mr. Vukovich is a predator,” Kelso said late last night. “He has a history of sodomy and preying on boys with mental retardation.”

Kelso said his department is continuing to investigate Sanchez' death. Asked if Vukovich was a suspect in the boy's death, Kelso said, “We can place Mr. Vukovich in the area and with Peter Sanchez
about the time he was killed. It's not a stretch to consider him a suspect in the death.”

The rest of the story was background on Petey's death.

How close, I wondered, had we come to crossing paths with Jack Vukovich on Chestnut Ridge? It gave me chills.

“What's the paper say?” Deak asked, stretching his arms over his head.

“Nothing that you're going to want to read.”

His eyes widened and he reached for the paper, which I handed him story-side up. He read in surprising silence, showing no emotion other than a slow shaking of his head. “Well, at least this answers my question,” he said.

“What question?”

“Remember my question: What was Petey doing up on that hill?” He slapped twice at the paper. “That's what he was doing. God, this is sick.”

“We dodged a bullet,” I said.

“I guess,” he said, staring off. “This is going to just kill Mom and Grandpa.”

“When you said that your uncle had some problems before moving back to Crystalton, I'm assuming this is what you were talking about?”

“No one ever told me what it was about. All they said was that he had some problems and had to move back. I always knew he was no good. What kind of man sodomizes mentally retarded kids?” He dropped the paper on the floor. “I hope he burns in hell.”

“That's a little harsh.”

“It's a sin, Hutch. It's a sin against man and a sin against God.” He sat up quickly on the couch, both hands gripping the seam of the maroon cushion, and looked hard into my eyes. “‘But the men of Sodom were very wicked, and sinners before the face of the Lord, exceedingly.' Genesis thirteen-thirteen.”

I put my hands up, palms facing Deak. “Okay, okay, Deak, I don't want to tangle with you or God about this.”

*    *    *

Adrian didn't show up for that night's game against Adena. I overheard Pepper tell our manager that his brother had some kind of stomach virus.

“Where is he?”

“Home. He's a fuckin' basket case. This whole thing with One-Eyed Jack has got him so rattled he hasn't been out of bed all day except to shit and throw up.”

In my short life, I had never known Adrian Nash to miss a ball game. I had seen him show up for baseball games covered with poison ivy, play basketball with a 102-degree fever, and play the last quarter of a football game with a broken finger on his throwing hand. He was a warrior. The assault on his conscience was apparently more disabling than any physical ailment.

“You don't look so good yourself.”

He grabbed a baseball out of the milk carton on the bench and we started jogging toward the outfield grass to throw. “I gotta admit it, Hutch, when I saw those cop cars coming across the playground, I about pissed myself. It's got me rattled. I thought that if we just kept our mouths shut this would all go away in a couple of days, a week at the most, but Mother of Christ, it just keeps getting worse. I thought we were home free, then One-Eyed Jack gets his ass arrested for buggerin' Petey and now that's all everyone's talking about again. I just want it to go away.” He looked over at Deak, who was stretched out in the centerfield grass, pulling his right foot toward the small of his back. “How's the preacher holding up?”

“About as well as can be expected for someone whose uncle was just exposed as a sexual deviant—embarrassed, pissed off, worried about his grandfather—and all that got heaped on top of the fact that he still thinks we should go to the cops.”

“Is he going to crack?”

“I don't know. Right now he's focused on hating his uncle.”

“That gives us some time.”

I nodded. “Tick-tock.”

“What?”

I lobbed the ball to him. “Nothing.”

A
s a young boy sitting in the congregation of the Crystalton United Methodist Church and looking up at the Reverend Forest P. Timlinson in the pulpit, I thought I was staring into the face of God. He was a distinguished Tennessean with a light drawl, an oval face creased deep at the eyes and across the forehead, hair like snow, pale blue eyes, and a slight smile. He had grown up in the backwoods of Tennessee and played offensive tackle for the Vanderbilt University football team. He was broad across the shoulders and stood six-foot-five, and when he grabbed the sides of the pulpit with his massive hands and leaned toward the congregation to emphasize a point, he was a most imposing sight.

The Yankee congregation was a little suspect of Reverend Timlinson when he arrived in Crystalton shortly after World War II. They appreciated the fact that he had been a Marine and had a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star that he earned fighting his way across several South Pacific beachheads, including Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, but they were leery of his Southern twang and the way he answered their questions with questions of his own. However, he ingratiated himself to them for life in March of 1949 when an explosion ripped through the Belmont Coal Company's No. 3 mine in Little Salt Run. The slope mine caved in a half-mile below the surface, trapping forty men in the rubble. As rescue workers made their way down the shaft, Reverend Timlinson donned a miner's hat and followed them in, struggling to squeeze his giant frame under the
busted timbers. He prayed over the dying and comforted the injured. The most repeated story from that day was of Reverend Timlinson praying over Joe Grabowski, whose two legs were pinned beneath a slab of stone the size of a station wagon. As he prayed, an injured miner named Eddie Barone was being hauled out of the chaos on a stretcher. As he passed the kneeling Reverend Timlinson, Eddie reached out and touched the preacher's arm and said, “Reverend, please include me in that prayer.”

Reverend Timlinson raised his head, saw that Eddie's injuries were not life-threatening, and said, “I'll get to you later, Eddie. Right now I want God's full attention focused on Joe.”

Joe Grabowski lost his left leg below the knee and the ankle on the right never bent again, but he swore it was the work of Reverend Timlinson that saved his life. Twenty years later, when the United Methodists tried to move Reverend Timlinson to a church in Youngstown, there was such a revolt in Crystalton that they never tried it again.

He didn't yell from the pulpit, or pound his fists, or threaten us with eternal damnation. Rather, he talked about life, personal responsibility, service, and following the “spirit of the law” that the Bible presented. He never claimed to have all the answers and was fond of saying that he didn't think God was in heaven with a tally book, keeping track of the number of things we did to please Him. Rather, he believed God kept track of the things we did to help our fellow man. That did not absolve those down on their luck from helping themselves, he was quick to point out. It was a message that resonated with his blue-collar congregation. Reverend Timlinson talked often of his family and his father, who plowed his land behind a mule and worked part-time at a local sawmill. The old man had struggled to hold on to his farm through the Great Depression, but still saved enough money to send his boy to Vanderbilt. His blue-collar roots helped him to understand the working men in his congregation and how they thought, worked, and lived.

On the Sunday after Jack Vukovich was arrested, Reverend Timlinson came out of the back room, placed his Bible on the pulpit, grabbed one of the heavy oak chairs that sat at either side of the altar, and carried it to the riser in front of his congregation. He
was wearing a black cassock and a purple stole with gold satin tassels. He sat down and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and interlocking his fingers, which hung limp between his knees, and said, “Let's all talk a little bit.” He asked the organist and members of the choir to leave the risers at the front of the church and join the congregation. When they were seated, he smiled and said, “Did you ever get a bad splinter?” He held his left hand up and squinted at his index finger, as though examining an imaginary splinter. For a moment he kept his eyes focused on the end of his finger as he spoke. “You know, you're working out in the yard or in the basement and you grab a piece of wood and a splinter gets you.” He dropped his hand and looked at his congregation. “I hate those little devils, and if you're like me, you sometimes want to leave them buried under the skin instead of digging them out because when you dig and dump peroxide on them, they hurt like the dickens. Right?” The congregation gave a collective nod. “But, we all know what happens if you don't dig a splinter out right away, don't we? It gets infected and festers. Well, my friends, I feel like we've all got a splinter under our skin and we're not digging it out. We've decided to let it sit there and fester. This has been a difficult week for us, and I know you're all stinging this morning. I know you've been stinging most of the week. You're feeling deceived and you're angry. I understand all that. But, folks, what we can't do is let the events of the past week tear apart friendships that have stood for years. If we allow that to occur, it's going to be just like leaving that splinter under the skin, but when it's done festering, we're not going to be able to clean it up with a little peroxide. You see, if we don't dig that splinter out today, it's going to tear the heart out of our community, and I'm not about to let that happen. I love this town and I love you people, so let's get some things out on the table.”